SORRY TO DISRUPT THE PEACE

Winner of Independent Publisher Book Award’s Gold Medal for First FictionA Spring 2017 B&N Discover Great New Writers SelectionOne of Buzzfeed, Vulture, Nylon, and LitHub’s most anticipated books of 2017

Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She is accepting a furniture delivery in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is dead.

According to the Internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for ”the abyss.” Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother’s few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.

A bleakly comic tour de force that’s by turns poignant, uproariously funny, and viscerally unsettling, this debut novel has shades of Bernhard, Beckett, and Bowles – and it announces the singular voice of Patty Yumi Cottrell.

Praise for Sorry to Disrupt the Peace:

“Patty Yumi Cottrell’s prose does so many of my favorite things—some too subtle to talk about without spoiling, but one thing I have to mention is the way in which her heroine’s investigation of a suicide draws the reader right into the heart of this wonderfully spiky hedgehog of a book and then elbows us yet further along into what is ultimately a tremendously moving act of imagination.” —Helen Oyeyemi, author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“In this completely absorbing novel of devastation and estrangement, Patty Yumi Cottrell introduces herself as a modern Robert Walser. Her voice is unflinching, unforgettable, and animated with a restless sense of humor.”
—Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Patty Yumi Cottrell’s adoption of the rambling and specific absurd will and must delight. This is a graceful claim not just about writing but about a way of being in the world, an always new and necessary way to contend with this garbage that surrounds us, these false portraits of our hearts and minds. This book is not a diversion—it’s a lifeline.” —Jesse Ball, author of How to Set a Fire and Why

“Sorry to Disrupt the Peace had me opening my mouth to laugh only to feel sobs come tumbling out. It’s absurd, feeling so much at once, but it’s a distinctly human absurdity that Patty Yumi Cottrell has masterfully created in this book. In the end I felt ebullient and spent, grateful to be reminded that life is only funny and gorgeous because life is also strange and sad.”
—Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls

“A sort of Korean-American noir, lean and wry and darkly compelling, I respectfully suggest you read her now.” — Ed Park, author of Personal Days

“‘ Behind every suicide, there is a door.’ So says Helen, aka Sister Reliability, aka ‘ spinster from a book,’ who is determined to open the door behind her adoptive brother’s recent death. Her search takes her from a studio apartment in NYC to a childhood home in Milwaukee, and yet the investigation is as philosophical as it is practical, as was, perhaps, the death itself. Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a beguiling debut: absurdly funny, surprisingly beautiful, and ultimately sad as fuck.”
—Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First

“Patty Yumi Cottrell is one my favorite new writers. Her debut novel is black-hearted and playful, an investigation into a suicide that becomes an investigation into how to live. Cottrell can make you laugh on one page and cry the next. Fans of Jesse Ball, Sheila Hetti, and Thomas Bernhard will love this book.”
—Shane Jones, author of Light Boxes

“In Cottrell’ s stellar debut novel, 32-year-old Helen is in her Manhattan apartment when she receives a call that her adoptive brother has killed himself… The real attraction here is Helen: her perspective ranges from sharp (New York is ‘a city so rich it funds poetry’) to askew (‘People who call themselves photographers are fake… the real charlatans of our time. Behind a photo is a perfectly fake person, scrubbed of all flaws, dead inside’) to unhinged (her adoptive parents’ grieving takes the physical form of a middle-aged European man who walks around the house and helps himself to pizza). Cottrell gives Helen the impossible task of understanding what would drive another person to suicide, and the result is complex and mysterious, yet, in the end, deeply human and empathetic.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)